A Blowback Hurricane

A Blowback Hurricane

Most
violence we face we've provoked. Those confronting us with
violence are exactly as wrong as if we hadn't provoked them.
But we are not as innocent as we like to imagine.

This
seems like a simple concept awaiting only factual
substantiation, but in fact it is dramatically at odds with
most people's ridiculously ill-conceived notion of how blame
works. According to this common notion, blame is like a lump
of clay. Whoever holds it is to blame. If they hand it to
someone else, then that person is exclusively to blame. If
they break it in half, then two people can each be half to
blame. But blame is a finite quantity and the clay is very
difficult to break. So once the clay is attached to one
person, everybody else is pretty well blameless.

I faulted
President Obama for instructing the Justice Department not
to prosecute anyone in the CIA for torture, and someone told
me that Attorney General Holder was in fact to blame, and
therefore Obama was not. I faulted easy access to guns for
mass shootings, and someone told me that antidepressant
medications were to blame, and therefore gun laws were not.
If you're like me, these sorts of calculations will strike
you as bizarrely stupid. The question of whether Obama is to
blame is a question of what he has done or not done; Holder
doesn't enter into it at all. The question of whether Holder
is to blame comes down to whether Holder acted against the
interest of the greater good; it has nothing to do with
Obama. One or both or neither of them could be to blame. Or
they could both be to blame and 18 other people be to blame
as well. We have problems with gun laws, psychiatric drugs,
films, tv shows, video games, examples set by our
government's own violence, and many other elements of our
culture; none of them erase any of the others.

Blame is
unlimited. Rather than a finite lump of clay, blame should
be pictured as water droplets condensing out of the air on a
cold glass. There is no limit to them. They appear wherever
another glass is cold. Their quantity bears no relation to
the quantity of the harm done. A million people can carry
the blame for a trivial harm, or one person can be alone to
blame and to blame only slightly for a most horrible
tragedy.

Another type of example may help explain where
the common conception of blame comes from. A man convicted
of murder is proven innocent, but loved ones of the victim
want him punished anyway (and in proportion to the harm
done). Another is proven insane or incompetent or underage,
but he is punished just the same. Blame is perceived as a
burning hot ball of clay that must be tossed from person to
person desperately until it can be attached to someone
deserving of it. Once that is done, there is no rush to find
anyone (or anything) else who might also be to blame. Blame
is a concept that is tied up in people's muddled minds with
the concept of revenge. It's hard to seek revenge against
numerous people or institutions all bearing different types
and degrees of blame. It's much easier to simplify. And once
the demand for revenge is satisfied in the aggrieved, it
ceases to search for new outlets.

When hijackers flew
airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they
were given blame. Anyone who helped them was given blame
(after all, it's hard to seek revenge against the dead). But
anyone who provoked or accidentally permitted those crimes
was deemed absolutely blameless. There wasn't any more clay
to go around. To blame the U.S. government for having spent
years arming and training religious fanatics in Afghanistan
and provoking them in Palestine and Saudi Arabia would mean
unblaming the hijackers. To blame the U.S. government for
not preventing the hijackings would mean unblaming the
hijackers.

This kind of infantile thinking has prevented
us from grasping anything like the true extent of blowback
our nation has encountered.

There are individual
encounters in which zero-sum blame thinking appears to work.
Someone who kills in self-defense is given less blame than
someone who kills an innocent victim. But translating this
to the public or even international arena seems to me to
fail. Violent social movements are wrong and to blame even
when they are resisting injustice. Crimes of resistance by
Native Americans and slaves can be seen as crimes even as we
understand them as blowback. The World War II era crimes of
Japan create a great deal of blame for Japan, and that is
unchanged by understanding the history of how the United States brought
war making and imperialism to the Japanese. Often in U.S.
history we have been confronted by a Frankenstein monster of
our own creation, and one intentionally provoked at that. This is different from
the myth of our innocence and of the other's irrational
random aggression. A more informed understanding doesn't
excuse the aggression. It erases our (the U.S. government's)
innocence.

Saddam Hussein was our creature. So was
Gadaffi. And Assad. "Intervene" is Pentagon-speak for
"switch sides." Our dictators remain guilty of their crimes
when we learn that we funded them. Every graduate of the
School of the Americas who heads off into the world to
murder and torture is to blame for doing so, and so is the
School of the Americas, and so are the taxpayers who fund it
and the governments that send students to attend it.

We
imagine that crazy irrational Iranians attacked us out of
the blue in 1979, whereas the CIA's coup of 1953 made the
embassy takeover predictable -- a completely different thing
from justifiable.

Britain and its apprentice /
master-to-be the United States long feared an alliance
between Germany and Russia. This led to facilitation of the
creation of the Soviet Union. And it led to support for the
development of Nazism in Germany. The goal was
Russian-German conflict, not peace. When war is imagined to
be inevitable, the great question is where to create it, not
whether. The post-World War I talks at Versailles laid the
groundwork for World War II, helped along by the West's
financial and trade policies for decades to come.

Also at
Versailles, President Wilson refused to meet with a young
man named Ho Chi Minh -- an initial bit contribution perhaps
to a great deal of future blowback. The Cold War was of
course provoked by lies, threats, and weapons
development.

Even if you assume that the United States
should dominate the globe militarily, some of the military
bases being built right now are very hard to explain, except as thoughtless overreach
or intentional provocation of China. One can guess how China
is perceiving this. And yet, while the U.S. military spends
many times the amount of money spent by China's each year,
Chinese increases provoked by U.S. troop deployments, are
being used in the U.S. media to justify U.S. military
spending. Most Americans have no more idea that their own
government is provoking China than most Israelis have a
remotely accurate conception of what their government does
to Palestinians. Watch these young Israelis exposed for the first time to their
nation's occupation of Palestine. Their world is
altered.

Imagine if people in the United States were to
learn what their funding and weaponry are used for. U.S.
weapons account for 85% of international weapons sales.
While the NRA bought a political party, Lockheed Martin
bought two. We don't talk about it, but many U.S. wars have
been fought against U.S. weapons. U.S. wars like the recent
one in Libya result in more violence in places like Mali.
U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and Afghanistan are
generating intense anger, and blowback that has already
included the targeting and killing of drone pilots, as well
as attempted acts of terrorism in the United States.

When
will we ever learn? The hacker group Anonymous replaces
government websites with video games to "avenge" Aaron
Swartz, and we laugh. But vengeance is at the root of our
inability to think sensibly about blame, which is in turn at
the root of our inability to process what is being done to
the people of the world in our name with our funding.
Because war is not inevitable, everywhere we stir it up is
somewhere that might have lived without it. We spend $170
billion per year on keeping U.S. troops in other people's
countries. Most people living near U.S. military bases do
not want them there. Many are outraged by their presence.
The blowback will keep coming. We should begin to understand
that it is normal, that it is the theme of our entire
history, that its predictability does not of course justify
it, that we are to blame, and that there's plenty of blame
for anyone else who's earned
it.

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